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'Bowieland' Flickr/Matt M. Some rights reserved

The death of
David Bowie was felt thoroughly on all media platforms, pub playlists, shopping
centres and IRL conversations in the last week or so. It was a moment of
‘shared time’, where social networks are occupied by the same thing. His music
was ecstatic; we can only offer our hands in silent communion to him, ‘up here
[I’m in] in heaven’. It was no real hubris for him to say on his last advance single,
‘Lazarus’, that ‘now everybody knows my name.’

Strange then
that Bowie can still be understood as vaguely intimate with the BBC. It would
be hard to imagine such an androgynous glam-rocker being coupled with the Corporation
as it is today.

Bowie performed
several times on BBC over the course of his career; the first session came on
radio, 24th
December 1967. Some of these were released in 2000 as ‘Bowie at the Beeb’,
including the sessions from 1968 – 1972. The use of the colloquial shorthand
suggests a familial bond between the BBC and Bowie, reflecting the symbiosis
between BBC and popular culture that was strong at that particular historical
juncture.

Indeed the BBC
were there for Bowie at the first: in the spluttering, grainy footage wherein
the typical bespectacled patrician interviews a 17-year-old smirking elfin prankster,
none other than Bowie himself, co-founder of the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Long-Haired Men.

Much of British pop
music’s heritage can find moments like this where a star already has an early
relationship with the public service broadcaster.

Can one
seriously imagine an anthem such as this, made in the current historical moment
and residing in the collective unconscious of early morning mumblings at the
fridge door, on the radios of passing cars, and in the most ecstatic minutes
lying on your bed listening to it for the first time?

The moment of
Bowie’s death brilliantly threw this into sharp contrast. As alluded
to by a perplexed Lorde, everyone seemed to be labouring under the illusion
that they themselves were the only ones who could truly understand the depth of Bowie’s music; because of his
weirdness and uniqueness, this niche was known only to them.

But it turns out
that the depths of this niche were densely populated, by, well, pretty much
everyone. It was precisely this privatized delusion that was given lie to upon
his death. We remembered it was possible to be considered ‘weird’, and for it
to also be coincident with notions of public and, crucially, Britishness.

Bowie embodied a
vicarious joy of what we saw as the possibility for what we could be, and we
applauded him for pushing at the boundaries of what is considered possible and
at the possibilities of realism. Bowie’s favourite authors were ruthless
satirists of reality: W.S.
Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, astronauts of the unimaginable, Bowie was at
home with them. We want to get away from ourselves sometimes.

The final pulse
of light from Bowie’s (black)star allowed us to glimpse at some possibilities
for the BBC. Perhaps it is necessary to resist the austere rubric of
value-for-money. For there are many ways to interpret its editorial guidelines
of what ‘our
audiences would reasonably expect to hear’. Herein there is the
ever-present danger of ceding too much to the already safe, and for an inclination
in its commissioning towards a perceived ‘reasonable’ middle. Hence the
continued commissions of programs like The
Voice, with its relentless focus on the bildungsroman
rags-to-riches Self, and its fairly reliable viewing numbers.

But to shield
itself behind such a creed means the BBC can never take any Bowie-like leaps into the
unknown. Airing Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky’s films at 9pm on a Friday
night — which, simultaneous to airing ‘Starman’, a song about the coming of
youth’s saviour in extraterrestrial form, it was wont to do — would be decried as
elitist, out-of-touch snobbery. Of course, no audience could reasonably have expected
Starman.

The
BBC and Bowie do not have a cause-and-effect relationship, and the bedrocks of
British pop are substantially weaker now, over and above the BBC’s influence. What the example of Bowie highlights is the absolute imperative for a metric other than that of
viewing figures and clicks, and for this to be calibrated as such in regards to
funding.

Bowie was able
to produce weird sounds and visions that took us out of ourselves, that pointed
away from the self, and specifically that were not in deference to a grey,
moribund reality of what is considered realist: zombie anthems of the ‘strong
economy’ and calls
to close the border, all backed up by spreadsheets and metadata of viewing
habits. Bowie was a
relentless modernist, a purveyor of the new who took the most vivid and
electric aesthetics regarding music, musicals, theatre, and gender and made
them popular and funny. He would have deigned to even describe them as such, he
dismissed claims he was outrageous with a cattish shrug.

To me this is his last great gift, he couldn’t
give everything away but he did give us an idea of what it would mean to be
popular, accessible and weird, angelic
and liberated. The infrastructure of a public service broadcaster such as the
BBC had a role in making David Bowie’s world, our world. This is the light by
which it could navigate its future.